TRAVEL Into Africa
While sailing in Madagascar 20 years ago, our family met a real-life smuggler. He arrived bare-chested on the beach with a large tooth around his neck. It was his grandmother's, he told our children, who believed he was a pirate come to life. He fascinated us with stories of diving shipwrecks and finding treasure, mostly true, we later found out, and we were later told he was a smuggler. One night, as we sat on our yacht in the quiet calm of Russian Bay on the west coast, the stars seemed to blank out for a moment, and we realised it was our smuggler leaving quietly on his black yacht, probably with a load of rum.
That trip was the start of my fascination with Madagascar. The next time we visited this strange and wonderful island 10 years later, we met a ‘supposedly reformed’ smuggler now running a yacht charter business. He looked ordinary, but the stories he hinted at were not. Now, I'm back on a yacht charter with my family to meet more wild characters and drink the famous Madagascan
